Taxi Driver Online

Just read a flyer from Autocab.

Apparently V Cars at Swindon, used to be Millenium and Link until they merged together, have thrown out Evocab and oput in an Autocab system.

This surprises me because both Millenium and Link were staunch Auriga customers for years.

Thetwo companies combined now make up 550 cars.

I rang V Cars office today to check if it is true (I know folks there) and was told yes they had swapped. After a year of Evocab crashing repeatedly the management decided to swap to Autocab.

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A member of the Hire or Reward Industry

Bit naive here, but isn't there some sort of contract that says you can't?

Or have they so much money they can change at will.

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IDFIMH

No contract that says you can't.

But lots of money involved. Though rumour has it that Autocab have always used a very sharp pencil when quoting for Auriga customers.

Not seen a modern Autocab system, but they never have had very vocal supporters in the trade (find any on here,they are scarce).

Nice enough people though, with decent offices.

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A member of the Hire or Reward Industry

i think part of the problems is that evocab isnt that much better without the new supa heads.
and as no one is using them in quantity. no one knows if they are that good.

also still not convinced on this clever despatch.

Autocab always quote u such a cheap price if ur a auriga customer that it sounds unreal ive had 2 quotes off them in the last couple of years & believe me the price was peanuts compared to the auriga system but thats what makes u wonder if they are only interested in getting their system in we have abt 12 companies around here who have the autocab system in & it works well for them but they were devloping their new linux system i dont knw if it is up & running it always has surprised me on this forum that u never get anybody who has autocabs system telling us anything abt it

It’s not just Auriga customers either. I constantly have customers on the phone telling me that Autocab have been making offers in fact one said yesterday that they were so fed up with the calls they were going to write and complain as it was getting close to harassment.

Our company policy is that we don't approach any company to try and persuade them to change and those that do do so of their own choice. We don't publish lists of our customers or what system they were using prior to any change because that's their private info. In any case to do so is just an open invite for sales people to start calling.

I rang once to speak with their MD and instead I was put through to sales. The misinformed salesman explained how my customers were leaving in their droves and how the company was about to go under. I just sat back and listened to the whole spiel before pointing out just whom he was talking to. Major embarrassment.

Good company, awful sales tactics though.

Bill

Speaking about Cordic system, does anybody have an estimate over the monthly GPRS traffic volume per XDA/car?

Thanks,
taxitech

I believe it is 5mb a month as part of the deal.

We never go over that, but we have a fairly low job count. It does seem to suffice though.

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A member of the Hire or Reward Industry

Thank you Tom for your prompt reply. I heard from different sources about this number 5M.

Do you have an estimate also about the size of exchanged data via GPRS for a job? In the cpaq document of CORDIC they say that the operational price related to the GPRS traffic per job is around 1p.

I'm trying to estimate the operational cost when switching from PMR to GPRS.

I understand that we should negotiate with the network operator the package that might include the XDA price, the subscription value (with or without included traffic volume), number of minutes for voice and posibble other issues. I guess the network operator might offer a subvention for XDA in exchange to a more expensive subscription. In the pachage, probably you have also a price for data when you go beyond the included volume (let's say 5M).

What about if the network operator does not offer XDAs? Do you know a provider of such devices to look for?

Related to the exploitation cost I'm thinking to not consider the offer for voice and still use one PMR channel as backup. The voice subscription (used as backup) will raise the exploiation cost I guess.

Do you have comments on all these issues?
thanks taxitech

I think now is the time I say

My airtime deal is very very good and is negotiated by Cordic on behalf of its clients.

Wouldn't be very fair to Cordic to publish how good exactly the deal is, sign up with Cordic and find out.

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A member of the Hire or Reward Industry

Thank You very much Tom. My intention is not to find the terms of a deal. If this will be negotiated by Cordic, ok. And if network operator will provides the mobile units within the deal we will find all the issues at the moment of negotiation. If for sure the XDAs will be part of the deal, ok.

However it will be interesting to find the GPRS traffic estimation per job from someone that is already using Cordic. Airtime deal might be very attractive but also it increases the price of subcription per XDA and I guess that for someone that already have PMR in place is attractive to use PMR as backup at least for a while.

But if you buy the XDA and software from Cordic you then get a deal without hardware.

We kept our PMR radios in situ, but are using them less and less and are not fitting them in new cars.

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A member of the Hire or Reward Industry

I have been looking at all kind's of data system's recently, we use marandy at the moment, which I find very easy to use, but the back up is cr*p, waited in the office 2hrs today for the owner of marandy to turn up and he didn't, no phone call no nothing.

All the big companie's brochure's dvd's etc all look very good, but I am going to visit office's using all the different system's before I recommend a system to my boss.

I only hope I make the right choice!

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stressed controller!!!

So who of you out there enjoyed (not) the 7.5 hour GPRS outage on o2 friday night?

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"Where to, Guv'?. Na sorry not going my way"

Blobby

Being fair, any system can be down for that amount of time if it comes to the crunch. I assume you had some form of backup in place? What time did the system conk out? How did it affect you?

Bill